Intro to Aurora Forecast Apps

Hoy ho it is Trevor from Plateau Astro and I'm recording this uh in summer 2024 and the last few months we've had a lot of Aurora that we've been able to see and I've been getting a lot of questions from people asking hey is tonight a good night to go and Chase the Aurora can you tell me about uh any smartphone apps or a website that'll tell me when the Aurora is going to come so this uh video is going to be a quick and dirty crash course into how you can maybe predict if the Aurora is going to come and a little crash course into some of the terminology that going to see uh once you go to these websites or use some of these these these apps at the end I might give a few other tips for seeing the Aurora I'm not an expert in this but I'll leave some uh links down below to some people to follow on social media they know a lot more than I do but I figured this might be useful for some people um there's lots of free Aurora apps out there so I'm going to show one I don't you know have you know any big connection with any of these I'm just showing some one of the free ones and things I'm going to show they probably apply to to most of them just laid out with sort of in different ways so the app I'm going to use here is called Aurora alerts it's free on Android and and iOS so I'm going to open this up here and the first time you open it it's probably going to ask for your location just so it knows where you are on earth um and so on the bottom here it's going to show you a few different things short forecast long forecast graph alerts settings um let's start with short forecast so there's some stuff you can see here on this page it's showing how much Aurora is overhead how much is on the horizon and right now at this very moment as I record this it's 0% you wouldn't be able to see any any Aurora um but those values change if there is Aurora on the horizon or or over your head okay next it shows some little fuel gauge looking thingies with like speed bz density BT I'm not going to go to too much on this just because uh uh this is a bit kind of advanced and if you get deeper in then you'll want to learn more what these values actually mean have Adder uh but I'm going to focus on this value called KP value okay so KP is sort of a estimate a measure of how far uh from the North Pole uh that we're going the see of the Aurora and how powerful they're going to be so it starts from zero and goes to 9 so KP 0 to kp9 so kp0 to 2 is kind of like not that powerful and you kind of need to be very high up kind of around the North Pole kind of like Yukon Yellow Knife area and maybe you'll be able to to to see see something there uh KP 3 to5 you can be further from the poles and it'll be a little bit more brighter a little bit more more more active uh KP 6 and seven that's where you're actually going to be like in you know Southern Canada like Calgary and Vancouver and parts of Ontario and parts of Manitoba that's where you're going to see some of that you're going to have a pretty good chance eight and N is very very powerful and that is what we had back in May 2024 we could even see it here in Montreal when it even with a naked eye like in the middle of a light polluted city you could you could see that those are pretty rare uh but that those are very sort of hopeful sort of moments so back to this app here it says right now we're at a KP level of two right now and in about an hour it'll be KP kp3 um so that's what those values sort of mean is like how far away from the North Pole you could possibly see the Aurora um so this page is really good for like short term like in the next 30 minutes or so but if you kind of want to know if in the next like half day the next day tomorrow the day after long forecast is what you kind of want to look at here and so this shows it here using the same KP values basically how strong it is is going to be so tonight it's going to be kp3 not really you know that powerful here in Montreal at least but tomorrow as we look down there you start to see in the red okay and it's it's kp5 okay around like 8 to 11:00 p.m. midnight around there that might be a a chance to see the aurora if you're kind of outside of the city in a dark sky area and maybe using a camera to get a long exposure and all that you might have a chance to actually see them uh if it is is clear so you're seeing some difference in the KP values here just for sort of historical Clarity back in May 2024 when we had that big Outburst I took some screenshots of what this app looked like like so just to show you what it can look like this was back in May and you can see red bars across the top here you see some KP 7s KP 8s kp9 and when values are that big there's a really really really good chance you're probably going to see them if it's if it's clear and you're in a sort of a non-l polluted area so that that's context of what this this can kind of look like so back to the app here the long forecast is good for like telling you in the next few days if we might get something okay and you can unlock different uh forecasts and stuff here I haven't done that I haven't paid any money to these they need to make money so no no shame for these app creators for doing that but I have needed to do that so this is area long forecast is good for like in the next few days type of thing short forecast is good if you're like decided okay I'm going to drive out I'm going to get to a dark sky area and you're sitting there in your card and you're like okay what's what's it like right now what's it going to be like in the next half an hour this is the page here want to be on for for that okay let's go to the graph the graph area this is probably going to show you a photo of either North Pole or South Pole I'm in North America here it's just going to show that so this shows North America and Europe and you see that sort of green glow kind of over the poles this tells you what sort of the probability of there being Aurora being visible in the next little while looks like here the next 75 minutes or so so it's kind of green and in the bottom left it shows a little diagram there so green is not very likely yellow a bit more likely orange better and then red is like a very good chance that you're going to see it so you know not looking like we're actually going to see any in the next next little little while here so not much here I'm going to show again that historical data from May uh uh back when we had that big Outburst so here is what it can look like like that you see it's very very red high probability of seeing Aurora so you can even see down in the uh Montreal area it's like very green it's yellow it's even red there and that's when we had that big that big Outburst uh right there here is some from the other day in uh August okay I me some people if they got outside the city they could see some so so this graph is useful uh as well uh for telling you uh when things are going to happen also too just going to show uh uh what this can kind of look like uh for KP values uh from the short term here this is again from May 11th okay it says kp9 okay that it still says 0% overhead 1% Horizon uh that value can can change and so those numbers 0% overhead meaning they it's right over your head that can go up quite a bit and I think I didn't take this at the right moment when it was overhead but that value can go up uh as well and the Horizon goes up as well okay so that is just like a basic C crash course into this particular particular app uh right here uh each app is going to do it a little bit differently okay and some apps have different alerts you can sign up get a subscription it'll send you an alert for your area when you might have things I have an idea to do that maybe you want to try that out up to you other apps Aurora now same type of information um just presented in different ways with different types of maps and all that uh Aurora forecast again there's a zillion of these on the App Store you can go and and and try these out and look at the different ways that they display the data so um yeah so uh right now we're sort of almost at the peak of seeing Aurora like like like we are um and the reason for this is that the auroras basically are coming from the Sun and the Sun goes through a cycle about an 11year cycle we're almost at the peak of that so right now is a good time to go and see Aurora uh next year will probably also be pretty good but in the years after that it'll sort of dwindle and and fade as the cycle sort of continues um Aurora are not the easiest thing to to to see you need clear skies you need to probably go to a dark sky area honestly uh you probably need a car to be able to also um see some of these um and the photos that you see that's probably not going to be indicative of what you're going to see with the naked eye those Tak with cameras and with those those cameras they do long exposure shots and that collects a lot more light than your eyes do so just set your expectations that it can be difficult it's late at night usually around midnight or so that you got to actually go and kind of Chase these so they can be difficult but it is very rewarding uh when you actually do see it so this is a big just a short short crash course into this I could go a lot more in detail I could go in a lot more detail on a lot of the numbers and stuff like that but if you're totally new to this hopefully this was a good intro to it I'll have links below for some other uh uh uh creators some other social media people that you can follow that know a lot more about this than I do and I hope this was uh useful for you so thanks for watching